Church, Crime

July 09, 1990|By John J. Farrell and Eileen Farrell.

OAK PARK — If Mike Royko, before doing his caustic column about John Cardinal O`Connor, had consulted Tribune files, he might have learned that, far from being lenient in dealing with gangsters, the church has been severe.

When Dion O`Banion`s people erected a large obelisk to memorialize him in Mount Carmel Cemetery, Cardinal Mundelein demanded that it be taken down immediately, and it was.

During the gang shootings of the 1920s in Chicago, church funerals were routinely denied to the participants. Burial in consecrated ground was denied frequently.

If, in more recent times, there has been more tolerance in a particular case, the purpose was to spare the feelings of innocent surviving family members.

As to Royko`s charge that the church tells Catholics how many children they must have, this is simply false, and he should know it. Child spacing for compelling reasons is permitted, provided that natural family planning is used-a method, incidentally, that some scientists are now saying should be more fully researched so that its practicality can be shown to match its undisputed safety.

Royko contends that Cardinal O`Connor should not scold Mario Cuomo because Cuomo is a ``good, sincere man.`` Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stephen A. Douglas were also ``good, sincere men`` but that didn`t make them right on the slavery question. Nor does Cuomo`s sincerity make him right on abortion.

If Cuomo is really ``personally opposed,`` perhaps he should emulate Abraham Lincoln by going to Cooper Union in Manhattan and giving the kind of expose of the rationale of abortion that Lincoln gave there and elsewhere on the rationale of slavery.

Royko`s parting suggestion that the Mafia might bail out the church collection boxes is a cheap thrust unworthy of a columnist of his stature.